Ehud Barak’s Dismal Record

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2009/12/25/ehud-baracks-dismal-record-victor-sharpe/
By Victor Sharpe

On Christmas Eve, Palestinian terrorists belonging to a gang linked to the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah organization murdered a young rabbi, firing seven bullets into his head in a drive by shooting.

The atrocity occurred in Samaria, the northern part of the so-called West Bank and was a direct result of the Israel Defense Forces removal of more roadblocks, perceived as yet one more Israeli gesture toward US President Barack Obama, who has pressured Israel to take “risks for peace.” ndeed every time Israel succumbs to requests from a U.S. Administration to provide one more in the endless procession of Israel goodwill gestures to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, more Jewish civilians perish at the hands of Arab terrorists.

The terrible irony is that some of those Arabs who perpetrate such murderous acts may well have been trained by American instructors creating a Palestinian security brigade, which is designed specifically to prevent such terrorism.

According to Israel National News, “Israeli soldiers recently removed the concrete cubes and metal gate that made up the roadblock north of Shechem, (Nablus) near Shavei Shomron, despite pleas by Samaria residents to the IDF not to remove it.

Israeli residents of Samaria reacted to the murder by saying: “The blood of the murdered man is on the hands of the Defense Minister and the Prime Minister, who have carried out a morally corrupt policy of turning the beloved into an enemy, and the enemy into a loved one. It is time to wake up from illusions for which Jews and their families pay with their lives.”

The ancient Talmudic saying from the Ethics of the Fathers sums it up. “…Those who are kind to the cruel, end by being cruel to the kind.”

The Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, does not seem to have ever taken this ancient wisdom to heart. This foolish removal of a security road block is but one more of his dismal acts. It would be instructive, therefore, to look back at some of his many errors in judgment.

On May 24, 2000, during Ehud Barak’s term in office as Prime Minister, Israeli troops withdrew from the “security zone” in southern Lebanon, ending 18 year’s of what had become known as the “Good Fence.”

Barak caved in to leftwing protests at Israeli military casualties and what the ever misguided Left termed the “purposelessness” of maintaining the 10 mile wide security strip that ran along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. On hindsight we now see how vital that zone was to Israel’s security.

But Ehud Barak had campaigned during his election for Prime Minister on a promise to bring the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) home from southern Lebanon. As Prime Minister he acted on his problematic promise and almost overnight the hasty withdrawal took place.

Many Israelis believe that Israel’s Christian Lebanese ally, the Southern Lebanon Army (SLA) was shamefully abandoned after giving almost 18 years of support to Israel’s efforts at protecting northern Israel as well as the Christian villages in southern Lebanon threatened by Islamic hostility.

Before the zone was created, the massacres of Israeli children by Yasser Arafat’s PLO infiltrators from southern Lebanon traumatized Israel. These atrocities perpetrated by Palestinian Arabs based in Lebanon occurred in the northern villages and towns including Avivim, Kiryat Sh’mona, Metullah and Nahariya. The security strip was created in order to protect Israeli civilians in the north of the country from such barbarous acts.

The foolish abandonment of the “Good Fence” became one more relic of Barak’s dismal record and led inevitably to the growing strength of Hezbollah, which quickly filled the vacuum left by the destruction of the SLA and the withdrawal of the IDF.

Barak had gambled that the withdrawal would boost Lebanese friendship towards Israel and that a mutually recognized border would encourage the creation of a strong Lebanese government and a cessation of Arab terrorism against the Jewish state. He could not have been more wrong.

Ehud Barak dealt a severe blow to Israel’s future security and embittered the lives of loyal Christian SLA soldiers who had fought alongside the IDF, many giving their lives, in protecting Israel’s northern border. The hasty rush to vacate southern Lebanon and the commensurate distress caused to past allies is not something Ehud Barak should ever feel proud of.

It was clear to most Israelis that the Lebanese army would not fill the vacuum and instead give the Islamist terrorists a golden opportunity to quickly occupy southern Lebanon and use the Muslim Arab settlements there as future bases for aggression against Israel.

Those fears have come true. Barak left the door open for Hezbollah, and now the Jewish state has an Iranian Islamist proxy armed with nearly 100,000 deadly missiles aimed at Israel’s civilian population centers. Not a very good legacy, Mr. Barak!

Now, acting as Defense Minister, he is creating yet again a situation, which is aiding and abetting Israel’s sworn enemies. His decision to send elements of the IDF to enforce a shameful, inhumane and humiliating freeze – at the behest of Barack Hussein Obama – on construction within Israel’s Jewish villages in Judea and Samaria is divisive and patently hostile to the Jewish communities there.

In the meantime, Mr. Barak is turning a blind eye to the feverish and illegal Arab building that is taking place everywhere throughout the territories and in East Jerusalem. And all has happened as a result of this freeze; this umpteenth Israeli concession in pursuit of a delusional peace with the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

Predictably, Palestinian Arab Chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, has reportedly upped the ante even more. He has essentially reneged on the so-called U.S created “Roadmap” by demanding Israel not only cease any building within the territories and East Jerusalem but accept that the Jewish state must withdraw to pre-1967 armistice lines before the Palestinians will talk peace.

These are the same borders that in places are only nine miles wide and which the late Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, once described as the “Auschwitz borders.” It is also said that when President George Bush was Governor of Texas, he flew with Ariel Sharon over the area, saw the narrow Israel border, and reportedly said: ‘Why in Texas we have driveways longer than that.”

We should remember that it was Ehud Barak who offered to arch terrorist, Yasser Arafat, practically all of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) along with East Jerusalem. This breathtaking concession was rejected by the Palestinian Arab leader for the simple reason that Arafat, just like his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, reject a state side by side with Israel: the Arabs want a state without an Israel.

Barak is alienating those young patriotic Israeli soldiers who are drawn from the religious seminaries and who are appalled at the orders to tear down Jewish homes and even synagogues if Barak deems they offend the Obama freeze.

These questions must be asked. In view of the apparent abandonment of the Roadmap by Abbas, will Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, respond by now abolishing the imposed freeze? Will he order Defense Minister Barak to end the distress caused to the Jewish villagers in Judea and Samaria? Or will he be forced, by the crushing pressure from the U.S., the EU, and the U.N., to keep the immoral freeze in place and, for the sake of his coalition, continue to placate Ehud Barak?

How many times must Israeli politicians be reminded that the Muslim Arabs will never accept a Jewish state – however tiny it might become – in land once conquered in the name of Allah?

Politicians like Ehud Barak are forever willing to inflict misery upon Jewish villagers and townsfolk rather than refuse the arrogant dictates of foreign leaders who endlessly indulge the oil rich Arab world by outdoing each other in their anti-Israel policies.

As a direct result of the removal of a security barrier on orders, presumably from Defense Minister Ehud Barak, yet another Israeli civilian has been gunned down by Palestinian thugs. Such idiotic attempts to placate Barack Hussein Obama, other western leaders, and the Palestinian Authority inevitably result in the slaughter of more Jewish souls.

This has been another decision Ehud Barak should never feel proud of. It is also another sad act in a dismal record.

Victor Sharpe is a freelance wrier and author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The Attempted Murder of the Jewish State.